Google sends out mobile-first indexing notifications

Google has started to send out notifications that websites have been enables for mobile-first indexing. The notification informs website owners that the search results will now reflect the mobile version of the website instead of the desktop version.

Google will use the mobile version of your website

Here’s the exact text of the notification message:

Mobile-first indexing enabled for example.com

To the owner of example.com,

This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.

Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.

This also happens to websites that are not mobile ready

Google also sends these notification messages for websites that haven’t been optimized for mobile devices. As long as the content of the mobile version matches the content of the desktop version, Google can switch a website over to mobile first indexing.

That also means that the rankings of these websites that haven’t been optimized for mobile devices might decrease. If a website hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices, it won’t get good rankings in the mobile results.

You should make your website mobile-ready now

If you haven’t done it yet, you should make sure that your web pages work on mobile devices as soon as possible. The easiest way to support mobile devices is to use responsive website design. SEOprofiler offers several tools for mobile SEO. You can create your SEOprofiler account here: